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[This space has  been quiet because I've been fact-checking and otherwise researching my Unsucky Gilgamesh chapters so far (which I hope to publish as a book when finished) and, since school started two weeks ago, writing for my students. The below is one such piece for my History of China students. There's no reason other students -- whether in school or out, and regardless of ability to pay the high tuition of the private school I work for -- should be excluded from the fun. Call it a Do It Yourself form of Open Courseware. I enjoyed writing it because I enjoy trying to make sense of that deep, rich ocean called Chinese history. So I hope some of you enjoy reading it. Any mistakes are my own, and I'd love to hear your corrections or other pushbacks.]

Of Confucius, Holy Clowns, and Holy Murder:
Some Advantages of Chinese Religious Atheism

I. Why Today’s Students, Particularly, Should Care

Why should anybody today care about knowing ancient Chinese religion? A few sentences can make the case:

First, anyone who is East Asian — Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese — should care because their family life and personality are very likely molded by the ideas that arise in the Warring States Period.

Even people who are not East Asian have good reason to learn it: it’s no secret that the 21st Century is shaping up to be the Century of China (and, yes, India), so odds are that anybody with a future will cross paths with East Asia either socially, romantically, or professionally. So they should know what a different world they’re entering when they do, and thus be able to navigate that world with better success, be it at the business dinner or the girl-friend’s parent’s dinner.

A third reason, of course, is that it’s simply good mental traveling to learn about all this.

II. Confucianism

Point blank: when we talk about East Asia, we’re talking about Confucius, the man most religious studies scholars agree is by far the most influential “religious” figure and moral philosopher of all time — more than Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed. One in four people on the planet today is Chinese; from the beginning of history to today, China’s population has always been larger than that of Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And China’s  people — plus, later, those of Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore — have lived the core Confucian values since 200 years before Jesus until today. (And they live them seven days a week, not just on the Sabbath.)

Even Christianized Asians live Confucian lives as their daily norm: family values, respect for elders and authorities, humility and a distaste for vulgarity and boasting, a gentle distaste for conflict, the importance of “face” and, glaringly obvious at SAS, of education — all of those things go back to Confucius.

So understanding Confucius is understanding most of East Asia today — from family life to social attitudes to manners and etiquette and sexual norms. (And to understand Confucius, the Shujing we read from last week will take you a long way.)

Second, Confucius is not a teacher about religion and life after death; on the contrary, his focus is the good life on earth, and how to live it wisely, happily, and graciously. When asked about who made the universe, where we go after we die, and the other Ten Thousand Unknowable Things, Confucius said:

To know when you know something, and to know when you don’t know something: that is wisdom.

He knew humans don’t know about the Unknowable, so he advised it best to pay attention to ritual and ceremony, yes, but to keep a clean distance from questions that can’t be answered — and from people who claim they know the answers. He thought those people dangerous to social order, and their superstitious claims dangerous to individual intelligence.

The Analects, the major collection of Confucius’ alleged sayings as recorded by his students, is a refreshingly easy book to read. Nothing in it is hard to believe except that its common sense and rationalism, which arrived in the West only during the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment a short 500 years ago, rose in China a very long two thousand, five hundred years ago.

III. A Holy Clown: Zhuangzi and the Tao

Zhuangzi dreaming he's a butterfly dreaming he's Zhuangzi dreaming...

And while Confucius does have a sense of humor in places, it’s one that at most makes you smile a little as you read. Like practically every other religion or philosophy, laughter and a sense of humor seem somehow against the rules. Confucius is serious this way too. But his “opponents,” the Daoists? They give us laughs by the belly-full, while all the while discussing the same subjects the more sober religions talk about. Reading the great Zhuangzi, Daoism’s second great sage, is like reading Jesus doing stand-up comedy. You can’t help but love the guy. He’s a hoot, and he’s also as deep as they come (in my book, anybody who insists there’s nothing unholy about laughter, that it’s every bit as sacred as all the more depressing emotions we usually find glooming up houses of worship, is wise by definition. Why shouldn’t laughter and play count among the holy things? What’s more heavenly than that?).

Zhuangzi had no patience for the Confucians. He was an individualist and an escapist, believing the wisest reaction to suffering is not to try to “fix the problem,” but instead to flow with it, “like water — seeking the path of least resistance.” You can’t fix human society any more than you can fix an earthquake or a drought. You fix your own mind’s way of reacting to things, stop freaking out when life is hard, slow down and enjoy it, and don’t get caught up chasing gold and honors. It’s all a fool’s errand to him. He prefers to go fishing and tell good, deep, playful stories. Your favorite weird uncle. (And one of my five favorite human beings in history.)

IV. A Tangent: Connections to Greece

These might help, if you remember the basics about Greece from other classes:

Greek and Chinese philosophy share a sort of “philosophical relay race” pattern: Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle. In China, Confucianism has a similar threesome: Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi.

Socrates, like Confucius, never wrote his philosophy down. We know Socrates through the writings of Plato, yet Plato took Socrates’ ideas into areas Socrates may not have agreed with. Similarly, Mencius studied under Confucius’ grandson, so there’s a Socrates-Plato/Confucius-Mencius pattern there.

Aristotle studied under Plato, but ended up arguing against his master. Xunzi similarly argues against Mencius concerning, above all, human nature. As Ebrey explains, Mencius thought human nature was essentially good, but a bad environment can corrupt it (thus the importance of a model king). Xunzi says this is naive, that human nature is prone to stupidity and vice, and thus needs education. (Not the kind of education in today’s world, which more and more seems to teach that education is simply a means for getting a job and making a lot of money, which is what success means. Confucians taught that the pleasures of an educated life are themselves the wealth, and the success. The gold is in the mind, not the bank.)

Xunzi is also interesting as the first flat-out atheist in Chinese philosophy. Confucius was not, mind you, an atheist. He said “We can’t know about God, Gods, and before and after life.” That’s an agnostic position: “a-” means “not,” and “gnostic” means “knowledge” — so Confucius is agnostic. Xunzi is different. He says, flat out, no gods are out there, as plain as an atheist can put it. But he continues with a totally interesting argument: “Even though all of this religious belief is superstitious nonsense, we should continue and support it.” Why? Because first, rituals are beautiful. They add pleasing colors to our days. And second, they’re useful. People need an outlet for fears of death and frustrations with life, so let them pray away, even though it’s totally pointless. You AP Lit people might think of Aristotle’s argument that Greek Tragedy was healthy because it was “cathartic” — it let people drain out all of their fear and horror at the dark sides of life. Xunzi seems to think religion is a similarly useful form of “mental hygiene.”

And then there’s Laozi, Daoism’s “Old Master.” Laozi wrote the Dao de Jing (“The Classic of the Way”), and it’s so deep, mysterious, and paradoxical that I pretty much refuse to even try to teach it to high schoolers. Deer in headlights gazes is all I’ve seen each time I’ve had students read it. So taste it if you’re curious, but we won’t focus on it in class much, if at all. We’ll focus on Zhuangzi instead.

V. Holy Murderers

There’s one final “So what?”, and I’ll close with it: it’s tantalizing to wonder what Jesus and Mohammed would have thought about Confucius. I picture them totally approving of his morality: he argues, like they do, that greed and the fever for gold are vulgar and the “root of all evil.” He also argues that we should love our neighbors and treat everyone well. Confucius, too, would approve of the moral teachings of Jesus and Mohammed — at least their social ones. But Confucius probably would have drawn the line at believing their claims to “know” about beginnings and endings, heavens and hells, spirits and demons. One can only imagine how interesting their conversations would be if they had the chance to debate these things. And while that’s impossible, of course, somehow it still points to something I notice every time I pass through airports in the Middle East, the West, and in China: pretty much everywhere but China, soldiers patrol airports looking for suicide bombers — and they obviously do it for good reason. Muslims, Jews, and Christians have been fighting for thousands of years because of their conflicting knowledge-claims based on their ancient religious texts.

But traveling through Confucian airports, you simply don’t see these soldiers, and you don’t see the terror threats (nor do you see doctors who provide abortions being murdered by Those Who Know When the Soul Enters the Embryo, or political priorities in an age of global warming, economic chaos, and several other urgent problems, being dominated by strange issues like gay marriage by  Those Who Know that Homosexuality is an Abomination. Chinese newspapers and TV don’t argue about whether their president is a secret Muslim, either. On and on.)

Confucian countries are free of all of these strange things because in their culture, they know, thanks to Confucius, that they are Those Who Cannot Know Some Answers and, knowing they can’t know these things, they have no such Knowledge to Kill For. In their airports, instead of soldiers patrolling for Those Who Do, you more often see just a bunch of families, parents leading the kids, the kids leading their suitcases stuffed with textbooks, cramming that education day and night to please their parents — people who don’t know what any Creator of the Universe thinks, but who do know this: family is important, and education is important.

And it’s all because of a guy who read the Shujing during the Warring States Period 500 years before Jesus, thought it was wise, taught it to students, and left teachings that, 2,500 years later, have worked for more than half of the world.

Remember, this is a man with that old-fashioned European humanist faith in the library as a model of good society and spiritual regeneration – a man who once went so far as to declare that “libraries can take the place of God.”

–Lee Marshall, “The World According to Eco,” Wired.com

I have a hallway for literature that’s 70 meters long. I walk through it several times a day, and I feel good when I do. Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.

–Umberto Eco, ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’ (interview in Der Spiegel )

I’ll reward any geek-genius a million cool-points who can teach me how to make this possible on Mac OS X Snow Leopard: “Spotlight” search results with contextual lines around search terms for each file that matches the search.

You know, a Spotlight search that doesn’t look like this:

–but instead, looks like this:

Here’s the vision: My hard drive has dozens and dozens of carefully selected ebooks about my areas of interest right now — primarily World History and Chinese History. I’ve invested a good bit of cash into this because I want a “searchable academic library” on my laptop, out of the following heretical conviction: academic ebooks on a hard drive are a better resource than the internet. Think about it: less time sifting through online search hits; less time evaluating each site’s reliability; higher quality writing; deeper depth of coverage and analysis; broader sample of perspectives from reputable historians specializing in the topics of interest.

Interlude: “I Won’t Go Off on How Exciting This Is”

(I won’t go off on how exciting I find this historically new possibility to have an entire library of hundreds of books in your laptop — a portable, personalized university library, so to speak — ready to be searched, sorted, sifted, copied, compiled, compared, and to generally give you a booklover’s orgasm for its technological speed and literary quality. I just won’t. I won’t say another word about the literal thousands of books you can fit on a standard 500 gigabyte hard drive today, and all but the last few decades of them free and public domain. Not a word, I tell you. I’ll just pretend it’s nothing to get excited about, mention how this idea relates to Umberto Eco’s insistence that personal libraries are more valuable for the books they contain that you haven’t read — but might one day need to crack open to satisfy a spontaneous blast of learning-lust — than for the ones that you have read. Not a word.)

Back to the Geek Challenge:

Let me illustrate:

I posted a vodcast about the Opium Wars and the Fall of the Qing Dynasty on Youtube last year for my History of China course, embedded it on my class Ning for my students to watch and/or download, then promptly ignored the YouTube page. But a couple of days ago I went there for some reason, and discovered a couple thousand visits and a dozen or more comments from the world. Some were the barbaric doozies you’d expect from the Wingnutosphere, but others were quite good — to wit: One viewer questioned a claim I made in the lecture about opium being illegal in England at the very same time England was illegally forcing it on the Chinese market. He said he thought opium was legal in England until the 20th century.

I could have googled “opium england illegal” or whatnot and spent 30 minutes doinking around Wikipedia’s “further reading” links, other sites’ “about” pages, etc. But I knew I had several ebooks on 19th century Chinese history in a folder, so I entered those terms in my spotlight instead, and promptly found info confirming my visitor was right (and interestingly enough, that the famous claim in the open letter of China’s Commissioner Lin to Queen Victoria was also factually wrong), while at the same time being able to read several pages that went deeply into opium use in 19th c. England. It took less than 10 minutes, and had the imprimatur of Oxford, Harvard, and similar ivied fauntleroys to ban the “But is this credible?” goblins from the learning.

The screenshot of that dialogue below (click image to enlarge) shows the quality of the ebook search versus a Wikipedia search, if you look at the level of detail in the passages I copy-pasted into the thread:

Upshot: What I’m envisioning is the ability to integrate ebook search results in classroom discussions. If a question like the Youtube gent’s above came up in class, this type of quick search would be entirely practical and seamless, unlike many a web-search. But, to get back to my original request, it would be even more magical if my hard drive search results looked more like Google’s, and less like Mac’s. (And the possibilities for speeding up the compilation of course packets with sets of pages extracted from the ebooks is another shiny bit of awesome.)

Let me close with a) a prayer that Miguel Guhlin (who has always struck me as an über-geek in the best possible way) answers this trackback and takes on the challenge; and b) since I never thought to share that 20-minute vodcast on the Opium Wars — a fascinating and tragic story that every Westerner should know, if they want to understand better how China sees the Western world — what the hey, here it is. I spent a goodly number of hours on it, which is no guarantee that the investment paid off for the viewers. You tell me:

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Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying.

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

Exhibit One: Twain as the Fifth Horseman

This reads like something straight out of Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, or Hitchens:

Transcribed:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is — in our country, particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell.  Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Exhibit Two: Twain Against the Neocons

This snippet, if you look at the top, picks up after quoting Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s apparent statement concerning a US Army massacre of Philippinos during or after the Spanish-American War.

Transcribed:

[TR's] whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms — and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets….

Who wants to place bets that teaching Twain in American high schools is going to become an even dicier idea once this book filters out into the mainstream?

And who else notes that Twain’s objections both to American religion and American politics are based on simple morality — that standard so important to so many free-thinking heretics?

It’s weird to call him a prophet, what with all the F-Bombs and other NSFW obscenities he drops, but consider that this dead jester said the below in 2005. Prophetic indeed.

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(h/t to Hullabaloo)

[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.]

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I just read a passage so striking I have to share it. It’s from Lin Yutang‘s 1936 book on China called My Country and My People, and is quoted in Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (another keeper):

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called “the method of watching a fire across the river” (detachment of style), “the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface” (lightness of touch), “the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes” (bringing out the salient points). (p. 18)

Nisbett’s whole point in this book of “cultural psychology” is to show that modes of thought differ from culture to culture, that Enlightenment universalism is belied by the evidence, etc, etc. The point of the passage itself is to illustrate how unlike our abstract and essentialist Greek way of thinking is the Chinese, which resists hard categories and prefers, as Nisbett puts it, “expressive, metaphoric language.”

I’m going to follow the dragonfly method and leave it to you to watch the ripples of that quote, or not. Just two quick impressions before I go:

First, it somehow ties to the notion of Core Knowledge, and underscores to me the need for that “Core” to be wordly, and not ethnocentric, in order to avoid a sort of in-bred genetic shallowness. We can learn much by trying to see through Chinese eyes, for example, and see our own cultural “core” differently, and surely often benefit from that. (Hell, the Greeks learned from traveling to Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor and the Levant, and North Africa anyway. Their knowledge came less from the core than that far-flung periphery, and it’s the synthesis they performed with it all that was the thing.)

Second, as a writing teacher, I cannot wait to share the above with students. Our Western language for teaching writing does seem, as Nisbett claims, abstract and categorical and, when you think about it from the Chinese angle, mind-numbingly dull: “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” and so forth are not words to inflame a young mind. But “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”? Oh, yes.

(Third: point two illustrates point one.)

Image by I’mBatman

Originally posted 4/12/09 on Change.org’s Education blog.

Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon.

If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a travesty of the novel’s allegory along these breathless lines:

Napoleon, children, equals Stalin and Karl Marx all rolled up in one. And Squealer equals their propaganda machine, the communist newspaper Pravda. Write ‘Pravda’ in your notes, children, because you have to know it for the test. It’s very important. It’s an example of journalism in communism, and how it prints government lies instead of the truth that we get in newspapers in free democracies.”

Of course, Animal Farm was more than that. Orwell was a socialist, after all — but he was also a thinker. So he could condemn what Stalin had done in the Soviet Union as a perversion of the socialist vision, while at the same time condemning the capitalism of  the United States and Western Europe with equal scorn.

That second part tends to get left out, I suspect, in discussions of capitalism and communism in most Western classrooms, whether English classes teaching Animal Farm or history classes teaching the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, capitalism is trotted out in the white hat of “freedom and democracy,” and communism in the black hat of “tyranny and totalitarianism.”

Teachers and textbooks who frame the issue this way strangle the baby of inquiry in the cradle, and slip in its place a plump little bundle of propaganda to comfort the kids and teachers by cooing that they’re on the right side of history, and the enemy was on the wrong. But “Capitalism versus Communism” and “Democracy versus Dictatorship” aren’t simple “Good versus Bad,” “Right versus Wrong” stories. Both sides, the communist and the capitalist, have their strengths and weaknesses, their angels and demons, their moments of heroism and of villainy. Both sides.

So you don’t have to be a communist to criticize capitalism, or a capitalist to criticize communism. Thinkers in both camps criticize not just the other system, but their own. (Politicians do this routinely when they craft legislation.) Any classrooms learning about these two systems should front-load their explorations with that truth — assuming, at any rate, that we want to produce thinking citizens in our classrooms instead of bleating farm animals. It sometimes seems we don’t want to.

Breaking News: War is Peace. Torture is Justice.

From the indispensable Plum Line blog’s Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:

Harvard’s school of government has released a study of how major media discusses waterboarding that really seems like it was done for Glenn Greenwald.

Click on “released a study” above and you’ll get the full report in PDF. The Greenwald link is a rich resource for the classroom too.

And they’re “rich” because they call into question America’s mainstream media — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and all the rest of the “free” press — and the bald similarities of Squealer and Pravda to the editors of those trusted institutions and their newspapers. (Torches down, dear nationalists: you should agree we have to read newspapers on two feet, like free-thinking humans, and not four, like all the sheep in Orwell and too many sheeple in America. Remember the good old days when an “informed citizenry” was a national ideal in America, before it was replaced with “a productive consumer” — a patriotic shopper?)

Need a teaser? From the study’s abstract:

The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

This type of study is not new, I know. But this particular one recommends itself for use in the classroom for several reasons: it’s current. It’s clear. It’s free. It’s from Harvard. Oh, and it’s about the survival of the rule of law and human rights in the United States. Almost forgot that one.

Or we could just give the lambs a handout about Pravda and follow it with a quiz. (more…)

A teacher recently dismissed, I gather, for encouraging critical thinking in her class in (where else?) my native United States writes:

I am stunned by the number of “conservatives” who truly appear to loathe teachers. What is up with that? Why the distrust of educators?

And all I can say is, “Come teach in Asia. They respect teachers here.”

To back that up, a little story that taught me that about four years ago:

Passing Through Customs

During my five or six years teaching secondary history and literature in Shanghai in the early-to-mid ‘naughties, my hobby was going on DVD scavenger hunts. I’d spend a good four or five hours weekly, usually on Saturday afternoons, making the rounds through a handful of DVD shops I’d discovered had the richest selection of offerings, and in each one I would literally check each disc on its shelves for any new arrivals. We’re talking hundreds of discs, sometimes over a thousand, in each shop.

To understand the beauty of this ritual, you have to understand the Shanghai DVD shop at its best. Shanghai is as cosmopolitan as it gets. People from every point of the globe live there, and they’re all potential customers for these shops, which cater mostly to foreigners. So to skim their shelves is to skim through titles in Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Thai, on and on.

For a history teacher totally uninterested in this year’s version of a lame-ass Tom Cruise blockbuster, these shops were a fantasy land. I’d find dozens of films I never knew existed, exquisite things: documentaries from the Soviet Union mashing up footage from the Nazi archives they’d captured when they defeated Hitler, giving the Soviet take on Fascism and the Great Patriotic War; other documentaries from around the globe, like the incredible Darwin’s Nightmare, that Americans would never see or hear about at home; box sets of Tarkovsky, Fellini, Cassavetes, Bergman, Chaplin, Zhang Yimou, Kurosawa, and other international Shakespeares of the Film Age; concerts of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Gustav Mahler, Beethoven, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, and other gods; on and on and on.

(Hey, if you click on all those links above on my blog instead of in your feed-reader, Apture popups will give you some wonderful clips from the directors and my favorite pieces from the musicians, links to Wikipedia, and more.)

Don’t tell anybody, but each of these items cost one to five US bucks. For the price of a fine meal that would turn to feces within four hours (pity the poor “live to eat” types), I’d come home with a feast of hours to last a lifetime — at home and in the classroom.

That weekly habit, over six years, produced a library of at least a thousand discs, whose thousand dollar investment proved Oscar Wilde‘s maxim about people who “know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Because this collection was priceless.

And the day came when I expected to lose it all.

That day came because those Shanghai years fell victim to the international teacher’s wanderlust. Wanting a change of Experience, I’d resigned my post and sought employment in a new land. Fate offered Korea, among other possibilities, and I took it. But that turned out to mean, I learned, that I probably wouldn’t be able to take that collection with me. Anybody familiar with airport customs knows what I’m talking about. DVDs from the People’s Republic of the Middle Kingdom scream “contraband.”

So there I was passing through the gates into Life’s Next Chapter: The Korea Years, and I mean that “gates” literally: I was at the [name withheld to protect the guilty heavensent] airport’s arrival gate, sweating bullets, because I’d packed my Collection in my suitcases instead of shipping them with my furniture.  I’d been told the odds of getting them in were higher this way. Picture two large suitcases stuffed with more DVDs than clothes.

My first suitcase had already spewed forth from the baggage carousel without incident, so I was hopeful as I watched for the second one. That hope was shattered when it slid to me with, of all things, this strange yellow collar locked to the handle. Printed on it were instructions for me to proceed to a customs officer.

As my luggage cart approached the customs desk, the lock went all Rabbit Hole on me: it belted out this weird electronic alarm. People within 30 meters stared. I hear convicted pedophiles have to wear such things around their ankles, and that they do similar things when said convicts approach schools. It’s not a pleasant feeling. And it wasn’t an auspicious start for The Next Chapter, this entry as a branded criminal.

Hollywood really has a hold on airports worldwide, I thought. Freaking weird. What’s in it for foreign countries to protect the profit margins of Western corporations?

The customs officer wasn’t exactly warm as he told me to open my suitcase. He was no warmer when he saw the dozen or so DVD wallets stashed inside a folded shirt here, some folded pants there.

He asked me to take them out and show them to him.

“Most of them seem illegal,” he said.

“I don’t know. I bought them in Shanghai. I don’t read Chinese.”

Then came Fate’s Fist: (more…)

Gasland is one to watch:

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Anybody want to place bets that we’ll be buying oxygen at 7-11 within the next 20 years?

MAD=Mutually Assured Destruction. A serious Cold War joke. Don’t have students read about this in textbooks. Show them the below instead. Amazing.

From Zero Hedge:

Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories – now that the environmental theme is rather popular, the following video by Isao Hashimoto shows all the nuclear “tests” conducted by the world in the period between 1945 and 1998. Based on public data, the world’s peaceful countries have already nuked themselves at least 2,054 times, with the US nuking the state of Nevada and its immediate neighbors about one thousand times. And keep in mind – the fallout does not just miraculously “disappear.” Feel free to consider that next time you look at bargain properties on the strip. Anyway, as Idealist.ws asks, “How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?“

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(h/t Crooks and Liars)

From the YouTube blurb:

[Stanford Psychology] Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

Interesting all the way through, but the gallery below previews  parts that should  interest educators.  See the full vid below the fold.

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The blurb doesn’t mention Zimbardo’s segue into education (at the 5.40 mark) and the allegedly re-wired brains of teens.  Nor does it  mention that Zimbardo also designed the fascinating Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. (Hover over that link to see a popup video via my Apture plugin.)

Ed 2.0 geeks may find little new here, but the RSA Animate production values package the ideas with more bling than usual. This may be useful for tech evangelists who haven’t resigned themselves to the similar inertial laws governing schools and glaciers . (more…)